The Effectiveness Of Brand Merchandising, And What It Can Do For Your Business

The days of social media and modern instant communication have been well upon us for some time. As a new business attempting to branch out with new ideas in its select field, there has never been a more important time to use creative methods of branching out to a new client base. A complex marketing strategy always works wonders, but it shouldn’t be relied on by itself. Sometimes you need to back that marketing strategy up by working on a plethora of different strategies to go over and above the standard considerations of the consumers you sell to. Here enters the idea of brand merchandising. Duly and intelligently applied, your brand can flourish with a number of effective imaging opportunities that can help your brand come off a certain way to your average client. But how do you merchandise, and what are the benefits of doing so? There seems to be an endless number of considerations to keep you hesitant to take that first step forward. Luckily, this guide will help you navigate the muddy waters of crafting a successful brand image: How To Identify, Get Bold & Manufacture First, identify what your brand warrants. Don’t limited yourself here. For example, the popular car insurance broker that operates in the UK named ‘Compare The Market’ successfully created a quirky fluffy toy line through a parody of their business named ‘Compare The Meerkat.’ These meerkat toys were an overnight hit. What contributed to their success was the relative exclusivity of the branding. You would only receive one of these toys if you successfully signed up to an insurance contract through their firm, and that meant that they were worth a premium. In fact, you can still find certain varieties of those toys selling on auction houses for upwards of $100. This might seem ludicrous, but it was made successful by intelligent marketing and merchandising. What’s even more amazing is that the faux business ‘Compare The Meerkat’ didn’t even have the same name as the actual business operating it, yet it still managed to successfully achieve its exposure aims. Identify how you could fit in here. Is your product a classy line of aged whiskey? You should consider crafting whiskey tumblers or decanters with your company logo in an exquisite glass product. You can craft these with a brilliant laser engraver on the factory floor. To further increase the merchandised items feeling of exclusivity, take a lesson from Compare The Market and make the products only available via a purchase of your premium whiskey. You can trust that people will desire it. Graphic Design The sound basis of a great merchandising strategy has excellent graphic design. This doesn’t mean creating posters and flyers but instead commissioning the graphic designer to craft an original and bright logo that best exemplifies what you are about. Pay a premium for this service, and be sure to scour the portfolio of the designer before making your commitment to them. This logo will last a long time, arguably until the day you might feel necessary to begin a full rebrand. You want the logo to be one you’re proud of. Sometimes, if your brand name is relatively short (or you work in the fashion industry,), you can craft a logo out of that. Firms like Google and Amazon make use of this. There’s no mistaking your logo for another business if it directly reads as your firm's name. Just be sure the word is attractive, and you can fit it well on the products you intend to etch it onto. The Benefits Brand Identification It seems fairly obvious to state that a firm merchandising strategy will allow you to increase the recognizable nature of your brand. If you have a simple, memorable logo, people will know exactly what that logo represents. We are visual creatures and can remember images much better than we can remember words. We also remember feelings well and can tie those to images. Everyone knows what the Apple logo looks like, and everyone associates it with premium and durable technological products. In the similar vein, the ‘Google Chrome’ web browser has now become the de facto logo for the Chrome series of Google products. Make use of this visual hack to embed yourself into the memories of your potential clients. Brand Loyalty When people feel like they’ve been treated right by a firm, they feel like returning to that firm. If your merchandise, you can effectively bestow labeled gifts upon those who are loyal to your firm, and that will only increase their fervor in buying your future products if they are of the same quality. Merchandising affords you the opportunity to retain your clients much more than any other method, as it allows them to feel like they are a valued and respected end user of your operation; which of course they are. Perception What you merchandise has a large impact on how you’re perceived. For example, you would never see Apple release a budget line of clothing merchandise sporting the Apple logo, because that directly contradicts the brand image of quality they have crafted for themselves. Identify your niche, and merchandise within that. For example, if you are a craft beer microbrewery, it’s likely that merchandising beer coasters, napkins and even comedy collections of historical ‘drunk stories’ for light bar-side reading could work in your favor. Increase Sales It’s easy to think that merchandising, for all of the benefits it espouses is just a simple investment to generate interest through purely materialistic means. This conjures up images of a king bestowing gifts upon his court to gain their favor. This isn’t the case. Your merchandise isn’t free, or if it is, it should be coupled with a purchase of your main flagship products. In this case, you’re generating sales and revenue by sweetening the deal on your end and securing repeat purchases. This is not a zero sum game. You stand to make some substantial profit here, and buying your merchandising supplies in bulk or crafting many at once will allow you to cut costs and further increase those beautiful profit margins. Merchandising your brand has a plethora of amazing utilities. If you can justify the initial investment, and manufacture using the best etching or crafting equipment available, you’ll be surprised at just how well it can succeed.